unopened gifts and cigarette smoke
by Mending the Sky
Summary: Quinn-centric one-shot. Quinn reflects on her mistakes. REPOSTED.


**A/N: written: early 2012; I lost the exact date . . . **  
**edited: August 10, 2013  
I don't own Glee's characters. **

She thinks, maybe, that she is destined to lose everything she ever had.

She stands alone under the bleachers smoking a cigarette. In the beginning of the year, she'd come here often with the Skanks. They'd relieved stress by taking long drags off cigarettes plucked from stolen packs they'd lifted from the gas station down the street, letting their worries rise into the air with the smoke as they made bawdy jokes about the school and its inhabitants. They'd marked themselves as rebellious, _anarchists, _even; the antagonists of the world.

She takes a lengthy drag off the cigarette, but has to cough into her fist. It's been a while since she smoked, and she doesn't do it often, but it is a huge lift of the impending, prodigious weight that will soon fall upon her shoulders again.

She'd had the perfect life, she muses. She'd been the most beautiful, popular girl in school, the head cheerleader who'd been able to silence _anyone _with just an icy look.

She'd thrown that away. (_No Homecoming Queen for you_, taunted the world and karma and irony. _No one will forget.)_

She'd had a boyfriend that loved her. Two, actually. Possibly _three._ Finn had loved her. Sam had loved her. She would've liked to think that Puck had loved her, too, at one point.

She'd discarded each and every one of them like trash. She'd particularly spurned _him._

She'd had a family once.

She wasn't talking about her parents. They were two of the most horrible people she'd ever known, and even though she'd returned to what passed as _home, _she felt like she'd never belong there again. Her Jesus painting frowned upon her in her own room, so most nights she'd get up and shuffle off to the guest room. It in itself was like some twisted reminder of what could've been, half-turned into a nursery thanks to her mother in a desperate attempt to bring her pregnant daughter back home.

No, she was talking about Puck and Beth.

At her feet sits a big, wrapped present, the present she'd brought to Shelby a while ago. It hadn't been opened. It probably hadn't been touched by anyone but herself, because when she'd entered Shelby's empty apartment that morning, it'd been sitting on the counter right where she'd left it along with a note saying goodbye. She'd taken her present back and left the door ajar for him because she knew he'd go there, too.

_Goodbye. _It sounded so final.

She inhales more smoke and refuses to let herself choke.

After a while, she hears footsteps, moving through the dry, dying grass to her safe haven below the real world. She is Persephone allowing Hades to approach her and steal her away, leaving only dead plants, sad songs, and the wails of her mother in her wake.

The king of the Underworld joins her. She doesn't look at him.

"Didn't know you still smoked," he comments, eyeing the cigarette hanging from her mouth.

"You do now." Her voice is devoid of any emotion, and to her own ears, she thinks she sounds _tired._ Defeated, maybe. She's lost so much that she thinks she should stop trying to get _anything _of what she used to have back. She wonders if she already has.

He looks at her with dark eyes chiding her, and she just looks back for a moment before taking another drag. "I don't do it often. I could quit any time I want to."

The silence rests over them like a cold blanket. Then he says, "Beth's gone. I was just at Shelby's apartment."

"I know. I went there this morning. Got my present back." With the hand the cigarette isn't dangling from, she waves a finger at the gift at her feet. He glances down at it, then looks back at her. She meets his eyes for a split second and knows they're thinking the same thing: _Shelby didn't open it._

"It was for Beth," he says. She nods once, slowly, to confirm. Her choppy bangs fall in her face but she makes no move to push them out of the way. _It was always for Beth._

"What was in it?" he inquires, staring at the pristine present sitting in the dead grass.

She looks at him and her voice breaks as she simply says, "Everything. Us."

They break eye contact at the same time. She delves back into her thoughts of loss, wondering where it all went wrong, but then inwardly she laughs at herself. Of course. It'd gone wrong with _him. _She should hate him for sending her into a downward spiral as her perfection shattered, but she doesn't. She doesn't think she could ever hate him. She wonders if he ever hated _her_.

Probably.

She voices her train of thought to him. "You know," she says, trying to sound offhand, "I think I'm just supposed to lose everything I ever had."

She awaits his response, wondering if he even has one. She immediately feels like she's said too much, like her paranoid walls of insecurity are after her and moving in.

Then: "You still have me."

She takes the cigarette out of her mouth and turns to face him. He looks just as sad, just as forlorn, as she. Maybe they could just be alone _together._

She takes a step forward and kisses him as the smoke drifts into the air.


End file.
